MARY’S ONLY NEWS OF WALLIS CAME FROM THE weekly letters she addressed to Ernest at Albion Gate. He handed them over as soon as he read them so she knew there were no secrets between them.
I have begged Peter Pan to let me go, Wallis wrote:
and he replied that if I leave him he will cut his throat with a hunting knife . . . What kind of man-child have I lumbered myself with? I don’t understand how this came about. If I wake in the night, sometimes I imagine that I am at home in Bryanston Court and hear your footsteps coming down the corridor, the Evening Standard tucked under your arm. Darling Ernest, I can’t believe such a thing can have happened to two people who got on so well.
Ernest’s only reaction was a grunt. Mary’s was fury, which she disguised by clattering her chair as she rose from the table. ‘If she genuinely wants to escape the King, she could just leave. The world is big enough for her to lose herself.’
Ernest folded his linen table napkin precisely. ‘She has thought of that, but the King says he will find her wherever she goes. Besides, she knows I can’t afford to support her in the grand style to which she has grown accustomed.’
‘I don’t see why you should support her at all,’ Mary muttered.
‘Indeed.’ Ernest rose from the table and went to prepare for the office.
Mary picked up the letter to check the address: Felixstowe. That was where the divorce hearing was to be held. For the second time in her life, Wallis would become resident somewhere just long enough for her case to be heard at a local court. The coronation was scheduled for May 1937, and the King hoped to marry Wallis beforehand, after the issuing of the decree nisi in April. Mary wished she could snap her fingers and it would be over and done with. The waiting and worrying that something might go wrong was horrid.
In her next letter, Wallis sounded in a low, penitent mood, but still she blamed everyone but herself for her predicament. The US press has done untold harm in every direction besides printing wicked lies . . . Last time I went out I was followed everywhere by cameramen. Towards the end of the letter she wrote: I am sorry about Mary, I am sorry for myself, I am sorry for the King.
It’s a bit late for sorry, Mary thought, not believing Wallis for a moment. She had taken the jewellery, taken the clothes, gone on the cruises. Complaining now was like a whore accepting the money then saying to her client, ‘Sorry, but I’d rather not go to bed with you.’
None of these thoughts did she voice to Ernest. She was the civilised one, the calm one, the woman with whom he could enjoy a peaceful life. It was hard to maintain sometimes, but she was determined.
Wallis wrote that on the day of the October hearing, there was a rabble of photographers outside the court, pushing and shoving, their cameras held high above their heads to get the shot.
The noise of their flashbulbs was like a shoot-out in some Western corral. I had to be rescued by two burly police officers who took my elbows in their hands and more or less lifted me into the courthouse, smashing a couple of cameras with their truncheons along the way . . . After that, the court proceedings took precisely fourteen minutes. Dear Buttercup Kennedy was blamed for everything and our case awarded with costs . . . I suppose this was what we agreed, Ernest, but I feel such a weight of sadness that I cannot move from my chair. I must dine with Peter Pan tonight and he will expect me to celebrate, but I feel more alone than I have ever felt in my life.
No doubt that was true, Mary thought, but all she could feel was joy that Ernest was one step closer to being free of Wallis’s clutches.
They dined that evening with Ernest’s sister Maud, and she shared Mary’s pleasure that Wallis would be out of their lives. She had never warmed to her.
‘You are mistaken in your belief that she has poisoned London society against you,’ Maud told Mary when the men had retired for cigars and brandy in the library. ‘I think you’ll find that lots of people who used to lick Wallis’s boots are now saying they hardly knew her. Only the other day I heard Emerald Cunard claim she had met her “only once or twice” and did not take to her.’
Mary laughed at this. ‘Emerald positively fawned over her at the Bryanston Court KT hours. How the worm has turned!’
She felt emboldened enough by this conversation to accept a few invitations, and found there was a tacit acceptance that Ernest had behaved with patriotism and correctness in doing as his King commanded. Ernest’s lawyer told him that Wallis had produced Mary’s love letter to him in the divorce court in a last-ditch attempt to blacken her name, but no one remarked on it. She and Ernest were seen as the innocent parties in the fiasco and Wallis was the she-devil who was harming the monarchy.
Wallis wrote to Ernest that she was too scared to stay in the Regent’s Park house the King had bought for her. Every mail delivery brings poison-pen letters, calling me harlot and Jezebel (although few of them spell it correctly). And last Sunday, while I was dining out, a brick was thrown through the front window. I can no longer have my hair done or go shopping in case some maniac leaps out to shoot or stab me. I’m pretty flattened out by the world in general.
On 1 December, after the Bishop of Bradford spoke directly against Wallis and the King, the British press finally jumped on the story. Ernest’s friend Bernie Rickatson-Hatts telephoned to say that the Times was preparing to publish an attack on Wallis’s character, so Ernest dutifully rang Fort Belvedere to warn her. Mary overheard his side of the conversation.
‘There’s nothing I can do. It’s not just the Times . . . I can ask around. Perhaps you could stay with some friends in the north of England . . . No, I quite see . . . When do you plan to go? . . . And who will drive? . . . Perhaps that is wisest.’
He came off the phone and glanced at Mary. ‘She’s hysterical. She thinks she will be killed if she stays in England, so she’s fleeing to France.’
Mary’s first thought was that it was not far enough. ‘Will she stay with her friends, Katherine and Herman Rogers?’
‘I imagine so. It’s all very hush-hush because she doesn’t want the press tailing them. Peter Pan is distraught but admits he can’t protect her if she stays.’
‘When is she going?’
‘Tomorrow.’ He mused for a moment. ‘She said the damnedest thing: seemingly the King has told Prime Minister Baldwin that if all else fails, he will abdicate rather than lose her.’
Mary was astonished. ‘What, he would leave the throne entirely? Become a commoner? That’s the last thing Wallis would want.’
To risk all in seducing a king only to win him but in the process cause him to lose his throne: it sounded to Mary like one of those traditional fairy stories in which pride led to a fall, or greed led to penury.
Ernest regarded her with a serious expression. ‘As a patriotic Englishman, I cannot allow this to happen. I will write to Mr Baldwin this evening.’
‘Saying what?’ Mary felt fear prickling her skin.
‘Two things: that I know Wallis will withdraw from the situation if she is given a chance; and that if my country requires it, I will claim there was collusion over our divorce and therefore we cannot be awarded a decree nisi next April.’
Tears filled Mary’s eyes and she covered her face with her hands, turning away so Ernest would not see her cry.
‘I’m sorry, my dear.’ He looped his arm round her waist from behind. ‘But this concerns a centuries-old institution that is worth more than the happiness of a few individuals. We must make a sacrifice if called upon.’
She watched him write his letter and did not try to stop him, but the blood felt like razor blades in her veins.
Ernest’s offer was not accepted by the prime minister, and a week later, on the evening of 11 December, he and Mary tuned their radio set to the BBC to hear the King broadcast to his subjects. The familiar voice was calm and the words moving as he explained that he was handing over the crown to his brother George with immediate effect and quitting public affairs altogether: ‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.’
Mary and Ernest exchanged glances, shocked that it had come to this.
‘I guess Wallie has gotten herself into the history books,’ Mary remarked. ‘Somewhere between Helen of Troy and Attila the Hun.’